Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Ok, so what the hell is up with Fable 2? I'm not sure why people enjoy it so much. Right now its raping the sales charts and people are eating this shit up like candy. But to me, there is only two words I can come up with to adequately explain my feelings for this game: PURE FAGGOTRY. Now when I say 'faggotry' I don't mean homo faggy, no. You can bugger each other all you want and I'll clap you on the shoulder and say 'Good job fella'. But don't get me wrong, what I mean by 'faggotry' is that Fable 2 is the ultimate embodiment of lame, it is so lame beyond lameness that it has transcended into the realm of utter fagginess.

From the art direction, to the voice acting, to that damn dog that follows me around and that gay ass yellow line I'm following all the time, PURE FAGGOTRY I TELL YOU, OF THE PUREST KIND! Maybe it's the English accents of all the denizens of this crap world, maybe its the high minded fantasy look of the terrain (hey, let's make it look Tolkien-esque but take out all the badassery and replace it with gayness), or maybe it's just my disdain for outdated children's storybook pastiches, but this game totally irks the shit out of me.

I must say that I have never felt so confined in a game advertised as being 'open world'. Yes, the game is huge and sprawling, but open world it is not. It should be classified as an 'open maze' game, because all your doing is running through an infinity of interconnected corridors that are dressed up to look like forests and fields. Yes Lionhead, your art assets are absolutely gorgeous, but I still feel like I'm playing fucking Wolfenstein. AND WHY THE FUCK CANT I JUMP? This pisses me off more than anything, what's the point of an open world game if I can't even jump a waist-high fence? Am I doomed to follow your heavily scripted plotline, with only a few deviances to find magical treasure chests that you've liberally dumped throughout the world? Oh hey, I just took the only path besides the main path you set out for me, and now I have reached a dead end... oh wait! What's that behind that tree? Why look it's a chest! A FUCKING MAGIC CHEST! Right here in this dead end. What are the chances. Thank you, Mr. Molyneux. At least its reassuring to know that wherever there is a dead end in this game there is a fuckin' magic chest to give me crap I don't need.

And what's up with this damn dog? This little bastard follows me around everywhere I go, and seemingly serves no purpose but to bark when another magic chest full of trash is around. Sometimes I pet him, he is a doggy after all. But his presence stinks to me of a gay-ass attempt by the designers to distract me with a semblance of animal bonding from the utterly lifeless panorama of their gaming world. It's funny how Fable 2 can be so colorful and sparkly and yet so dull and bereft of humanity all at the same time.

And another thing, minigames don't make a game, stupid. You can give me all the variations of a slot machine that you want, but at the end of the day it's still a frickin' one armed bandit waiting to steal my cash. Also, been there done that, circa Super Mario 3, bitch. The emotive system is also unintuitive and clunky, and makes NPC relations about as exciting as inputting numbers into a spreadsheet. Oh look, I can flex my muscles at this fat guy who for some reason I can't speak to at all, and who looks like all the other fat guys randomly wandering up and down the path. Well whoop-de-fuck. I've also never heard so much chatty quest preamble in a game before. Getting through a monologues' worth of an annoying English dandy babbling into my ear for a simple fetch quest makes me want to rip out my ballhairs and burn down my house.

But all these faults could easily be overlooked if the core mechanic of the game was worthwhile, namely the combat system. As I am a combat whore, I can easily fall for a shitty game if the fighting is visceral and engaging. But alas, the combat in Fable 2 is not. From what I've experienced so far, it is not in the least bit challenging for a jaded gamer like me who has played everything under the sun. I'm not learning anything new or putting my skills to the test. All I'm doing is following a poorly crafted story and pressing requisite buttons when it's been deemed neccessary. I might as well be reading a book with my dick for christ's sakes. A really shitty book that was written by a retard homonculus with no hands. That's right he wrote it with his teeth, and then was burned at the stake, screaming and writhing, for writing such a terrible story.

Now if I was a relatively new player who was not exposed to the last 20 years of video games I would probably shit my pants. But I just came off a 60 hour Fallout 3 run, blew away hordes of zombies in Left 4 Dead and adventures in Warhammer Online, so your gonna have to do a lot better than that POS to impress me, Lionhead.